Mint: A fresh look at your site

While taking a quick peak at Zeldman inbetween procrastinating and procrastinating, I learned of the existance of Mint. It was heavily touted by Zeldman and since it was only $30 USD I tried to buy it. This actually proved very difficult due to PayPal not liking me very much…

I’ve got Mint up and running on Muschamp.ca but there are two major problems, one I don’t actually have that busy of a site, despite what my webhosts stats package might say. A lot of my content including this blog are set up as subdomains, in theory Mint can handle subdomains however as there are a variety of ways to set them up, it is hit or miss.

The one developer behind Mint, Shaun Inman however is on the case, and improved support for subdomains is on his ta do list. Until than I won’t learn anything more about my loyal blog readers.

Already there is a Widget called Junior Mint which works just fine for quickly checking visitors to your site, showing the advantages and the popularity of being on the bleeding edge of Macintosh operating systems at least among the web design community. Mint uses JavaScript, PHP, and a MySQL database to track website users. It integrates just fine with WordPress and other popular CMS packages, infact it is easier to install on a dynamically generated site than a large static site like Muschamp.ca which required updating the of all my pages.

Update January 2nd 2019

It has been a long time and I’ve decided to remove Mint from my website. I haven’t checked it in years and I have Google Analytics, but my blog is just not that popular and I’m OK with that. I do want it to run faster however so duplicate analytics packages isn’t something I need. I’ve actually spent much of this year trying to speed up my homepage and blog especially for web surfers in China which is where I’ve been living for too long. When I first installed Mint I was living in China so it is a bit ironic that I’m uninstalling it just before I leave China again, but for too long this website and blog has been running slower and slower so I’m removing scripts, cruft, and taking action.

Somewhere along the way Shaun Inman blocked me on Twitter, which I thought was an odd thing to do to a paying customer, especially one who rushed out and bought his product right away. Way worse things have happened to me than being blocked by a developer I don’t know though we may have a mutual connection or two, hopefully my efforts to improve this website further helps me land a job. You can see what over a decade of stats look like though I think I stopped using Mint on a portion of this website prior to today.

I searched and replaced all the calls to mint and deleted the plugin but it seems something is still inserting the javascript, it isn’t hardcoded into my theme it is getting added by wp_footer() I think. Lots of javascript seems to be loaded JetPack, WPTouch and SlickrFlickr. One day I’ll have to make a new theme if not completely replace the whole domain every scrap of HTML, JavaScript, and PHP there is some strange phantom half uninstalled plugins maybe. Next time I upgrade WordPress, I’ll have to leave all the plugins off and try to debug it further.

Update: Something is still inserting a call to the mint javascript in wp_footer() and I not only deactivated the plugin I was using I deleted it and made sure the folder is gone. One plugin the folder won’t delete in Transmit my ftp client of choice. I think SlickrFlickr and maybe Disqus may be ripped out they load too much javascript and SlickrFlickr I hardly use though making it work in the sidebar of my homepage was a lot of work. I’m thinking of turning off all my plugins and seeing if something still loads mint, I search the entire directory holding my website/blog. I’m a big baffled. I wanted to get rid of all the calls before deleting it from the server but this website loads too slow in China and SlickrFlickr and Disqus access blocked sites so does JetPack but I only installed that because I was suffering so many brute force attacks, it handles my social sharing and metadata now too.

My attempts to uninstall Mint continue to go poorly. It has some authentication when you uninstall and it wanted me to re-agree to the licences which I of course was willing to do. I had to find my key then it said my key was wrong and he’s disabled all support and he long ago blocked me on Twitter for I don’t know what reasons. I think he went through some rough times, but yeah if you rely on one person to do everything and that person is unavailable you’re on your own so I deleted all the files and dropped the database tables and and it might be some .htaccess but since when can that call wp_footer() so that is not it, some plugin is refusing to delete and still writing to my footer. I think a new WordPress install with next to no plugins is in my future.

Update: It was a rogue feature turned on in HeadSpace2 a plugin that hasn’t been updated in years. I think I will have to finally switch to a different plugin for metadata, JetPack is too big, I may replace it with another plugin or two and apparently I should replace HeadSpace2. Sometimes old plugins have features that become “Pro” so it is best to stay with the old free plugin…

I’ve gone through hard times too. I wanted 2019 to be better but it seems like it will be just like 2006.

This entry was originaly posted on October 7th, 2005, it was last edited on March 11th, 2019 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Analytics, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP.